Ashwini Asokan, CEO and co-founder of intelligent retail automation platform VUE.ai, is working to evolve the world of retail, making shopping more of an entertainment experience. She’s spent a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence and she sat down with us to go beyond the hype – and give us some practical advice about how to make use of it as a product person.

Quotes of the Episode

Product people should be at the centre of the AI storm – and when’s the last time you saw one of them there?

There’s no point in putting one person in charge of ethics… it should be part of the company’s culture.

Listen if you’d like to learn more about

* What actually is AI? And is it a product?

* How do you derive value from AI? And when should you use it?

* What’s the difference between product management and AI product management?

* Deterministic vs non-deterministic problems – is there meaning in this, or just the appearance of meaning in the randomness?

* Ethics

Links mentioned in this episode

* Follow Ashwini on Twitter and watch her Mind the Product conference talk, Why We Need Product People to Save AI

* Richard Buchanan, Worlds in the Making: Design, Management, and the Reform of Organizational Culture

Hosts

The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.

Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. This year Lily will be launching ProductCamp in Bristol and she joins the MTP team as co-host of The Product Experience podcast.

A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media & entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. He’s spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), at a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music

Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page

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